Written By Jordannah Elizabeth Graham-Mayer

There is a particular kind of inconvenience that comes with being married to a songwriter. You can be sitting in a perfectly ordinary room, surrounded by perfectly ordinary domestic problems, and discover that your husband has made something beautiful out of a situation you would have preferred he simply resolve.

A song, for instance.

John has a new one. “Tom and Jerry.” His first solo single in five years, which is a long time to wait for anything, although five years in a marriage can feel like either an afternoon or a geological period depending on what is happening in the kitchen.

I listened to it, and my first thought was that it sounded like a man having an affair.

Not that I have discovered an affair. There is a difference between hearing a song that sounds like an affair and discovering that your husband is having one. I would like to preserve that distinction, if only because marriage is already complicated enough without having to conduct an investigation every time a guitar sounds particularly convincing.

But the song has that quality. Somebody is elusive. Somebody is not coming through. Somebody is being pursued, or is doing the pursuing, and the whole arrangement seems to depend on the possibility that the person who wants to leave might suddenly decide to stay. There is a suggestion of secrecy, or at least of a relationship that cannot quite be brought into the daylight without losing some of its appeal.

It is romantic in the way that a locked door is romantic when you are standing on the wrong side of it.

John tells me the song is about our marriage.

I looked at him.

There are times when the appropriate response to one’s husband is not a sentence but a look. We have developed several varieties over the years, including the look that means I have heard you, the look that means I do not believe you have thought this through, and the look that means I love you but you are making my life unnecessarily difficult.

This was some combination of the three.

I do not know what he expected me to say. Thank you for the song? How flattering to be the woman in a song about running away with somebody who might never show up? Perhaps I should be pleased that our marriage has inspired a song whose central emotional problem appears to be whether the relationship will ever actually happen.

We are married. The relationship has, in a technical sense, happened.

But John has always had a way of making the technically settled feel emotionally unresolved. I suspect this is part of what makes him a songwriter. It is also part of what makes being his wife an activity that occasionally requires a great deal of patience.

The strange thing is that I believe him.

Or perhaps I believe that he believes it. There is a difference, and I have reached an age where I am no longer embarrassed to admit that the difference matters.

A person can write about longing for somebody who is already beside him. A person can be devoted to a marriage and still find something compelling about the possibility of losing it. Desire is not always interested in the practical arrangements. It does not necessarily become sensible because two people have exchanged vows, acquired responsibilities, and begun arguing about things that would bore anybody who was not involved.

The song is not an invoice. It does not have to account for every feeling.

Still, I would have preferred something with a slightly less suspicious premise.

The title began as the name John gave a voice memo. I find this detail useful because it reminds me that the song did not arrive in the world as a carefully prepared statement about his wife. It began as an idea he wanted to remember. Somewhere between the voice memo and the finished recording, the idea became a song, and the song became something people could listen to and interpret however they pleased.

Nonetheless, this is the trouble with being married to somebody whose work is public. The rest of us get to have thoughts without anybody asking whether those thoughts are autobiographical. A songwriter puts a feeling into a recording, and suddenly the feeling belongs to everybody who hears it.

Somebody hears an affair. Somebody hears a breakup. Somebody hears the great love of their life, who left in 2019 and still has not returned the sweater.

I hear my husband.

This is not necessarily an advantage. I know the man behind the voice, which means I am aware that the man behind the voice can be very difficult to interpret. He can make a joke when I am trying to be serious. He can become unexpectedly serious when I am trying to get him to laugh. He can turn an ordinary exchange into something that stays with me for the rest of the day, and then forget the exchange entirely.

I do not mean that as a criticism. Or not entirely.

There is something about a long marriage that makes you suspicious of the idea that you have finally figured another person out. You begin to recognize patterns, then discover that the patterns have exceptions. You learn what a particular silence means, only to discover that this time the silence means something else. You think you know what your husband will say, and then he says something that makes you reconsider the entire afternoon.

John has managed to do this with a song.

He has made me reconsider something I thought I understood, which is the difference between being chosen and being pursued.

I have spent enough time thinking about marriage to know that the two are not interchangeable. Pursuit is exciting. It has movement, uncertainty, the possibility of an unexpected ending. Being chosen is quieter. It is the decision that remains after the chase has stopped being entertaining. It is the person who is still there when the music is over and somebody needs to remember where the keys were left.

There are days when I prefer the second arrangement.

There are days when I miss the first.

I imagine John would understand this distinction, although I would not necessarily ask him to explain it to me while I was trying to do something else.

John became more publicly enthusiastic about our marriage during the Solo Tour. I was glad he did. I have never wanted to be a secret in my own marriage, and I do not think affection should be treated as an embarrassing detail that must be kept away from the public.

But there is a difference between announcing that you are happy to be married and discovering that other people have decided your marriage is now something they would like to participate in.

The attention can be peculiar.

Some women have been aggressive in ways that I have found uncomfortable. I want to be precise about this because I do not believe that every woman who admires John is a problem, nor do I believe that attraction itself is a moral failing. I understand the relationship between musicians and their audiences. I understand that a song can make a person feel close to somebody they have never met. I have no objection to a woman finding my husband attractive. I have found him attractive myself, which would be a fairly significant problem if I did not.

What I find difficult is the occasional suggestion that a marriage is merely a circumstance, a detail that might be overcome by sufficient enthusiasm.

It is an odd thing to have to explain that your husband is your husband.

I do not want to become the sort of woman who spends her days monitoring other women’s behavior, nor do I want my marriage to turn me into a full-time interpreter of public attention. I have other things to do. I have a life that does not begin and end with John’s visibility, even if his visibility has a way of entering the room before either of us has had a chance to sit down.

Still, I have noticed how public affection can change the atmosphere around a relationship. A private fact becomes a public invitation to speculate. People begin to decide what it means, what it ought to mean, and whether they approve of the arrangement.

Then a song like “Tom and Jerry” arrives, and I can imagine the interpretations before they begin.

Perhaps this is about a woman he cannot have. Perhaps it is about somebody he is trying to get away from. Perhaps the marriage is not what it appears to be.

Perhaps it is simply a song.

I find myself wanting to defend the marriage from interpretations that have not yet been made, which is an exhausting activity and one I would not recommend. There is no end to it. You can spend an entire life correcting the assumptions of people who have never sat at your kitchen table, and still find yourself misunderstood by somebody who has.

So I am trying to let the song be a song.

I am also trying to let my husband explain himself without requiring him to produce a written statement every time he makes something that sounds like trouble.

This is easier in theory.

There is another complication, which is that some people have treated the earlier installments of this column as fiction.

I understand the temptation. The details of our lives can sound improbable when placed next to one another. We have had the housing arrangements, the children, the financial uncertainty, the peculiar logistics of trying to maintain a family while everyone seems to be moving in a different direction. We have the marriage that is both long-standing and, in its own way, still being figured out. We have the public figure and the woman who writes about being married to him, which is apparently enough to make some readers wonder whether the whole thing has been invented.

I am writing this as a real account of my experience. The marriage is real. The feelings are real. The questions are real.

I cannot make another person believe me. I can only write what I experience as honestly as I know how.

There is something revealing about the assumption that an unusual marriage must be fictional. We seem to have a limited vocabulary for relationships that do not behave according to familiar expectations. If a marriage is happy, we want it to look happy. If it is troubled, we want to know who is responsible. If it is both, we would prefer the writer to choose one and stay there.

But people are not particularly consistent, and marriages are not either.

A couple can be devoted to each other and still be bewildered by each other. They can be affectionate and irritated, secure in one respect and uncertain in another. They can have a private understanding that does not translate neatly into a public explanation.

I do not think the oddness of a relationship makes it less real. If anything, I have come to think that the effort to make a relationship appear normal can be more exhausting than the relationship itself.

John and I are not required to have a convincing story. We are required to live our lives.

The column is simply where I try to make sense of what that entails.

The other night, I found myself thinking about the phrase “still here.”

I have used it at the end of these columns because it seems to describe something important about marriage. It is not a declaration that everything is perfect. It does not mean that the problems have disappeared or that the people involved have finally become easy to understand. It means that, after everything has changed, there is still something worth returning to.

The phrase becomes more complicated when you are listening to a song about people who cannot seem to stay in one place emotionally.

John says the song is about our marriage. I think about that, and I wonder whether he means the excitement of the chase, the uncertainty of being wanted, the fear that the person you love might not come through. I wonder whether he means that even in a marriage, even in a relationship that has been named and publicly acknowledged, there is a part of you that still wants to be surprised.

Perhaps he means all of these things.

Perhaps he means something else entirely.

I could ask him again. I probably will. There is a conversation waiting to happen, and it will likely begin with me asking what he meant and end with one of us making a joke at precisely the wrong moment.

I can already imagine the look I will give him.

And I can imagine him recognizing it.

This is one of the less glamorous aspects of intimacy: the person who can make you feel uncertain is often the same person who knows exactly what your uncertainty looks like. The person who writes a song that sounds like an affair is also the person who knows where you keep the things you cannot find. The person who seems to be singing about running away is the person you expect to see when you come home.

I do not know whether that is romantic. I suspect it is, although not in the way a songwriter might prefer to describe it.

I know that I am still here.

I know that John is still here.

And I know that a song can sound like a confession without actually being one, just as a marriage can look unusual from the outside without becoming any less real to the people living inside it.

I am not going to turn “Tom and Jerry” into evidence of an affair. I am not going to pretend it does not sound like one. I am not going to make a spectacle of my husband’s explanation, although I reserve the right to remind him of it the next time he says something that sounds suspiciously poetic.

There are worse things than being married to somebody who can still surprise you.

There are also easier things.

For now, I am trying to remember that both can be true. That attraction can survive inconveniences. That public attention does not have to determine the meaning of a private life. That a song can belong to the world and still have a meaning at home that nobody else quite understands.

The marriage is odd. The song is odd. And sometimes I think the oddness is precisely what keeps me paying attention.

I would like a little more clarity, naturally. I would like certain things to be less complicated. I would like to hear a love song from my husband that does not require me to consider the possibility of an affair before breakfast.

But I married John, and John makes music, and apparently these are among the conditions under which I have agreed to live.

So I will listen again.

I will ask him what he means.

I will probably roll my eyes.

And tomorrow, when the song is still playing somewhere in the world and somebody else has decided what it means, I will be here, living the marriage rather than explaining it to everyone who has an opinion about it.

Still here. Still married. Still figuring it out.

For the moment, that will have to count as an answer.